SEAM CARVING FOR STEREO IMAGES

We propose a content-preserving stereo image editing technique by using stereo extension of seam carving. Seam carving is the process of deleting or duplicating connected paths, or seams, that consist of less important pixels in order to resize the image while preserving the image content as much as possible. The problem targeted in this paper is how to apply the seam carving method to a pair of stereo images, where the consistency between the left and right images should also be preserved through the seam carving process. For this consistency, we introduce new energy terms. Based on these energy terms, seam pairs between the input images are classified into two types, corresponding seams in order to maintain consistency or occluded seams to change the consistency intentionally. The novelty of this paper is that stereo matching results are fused into the framework in the seam carving. We demonstrate that by selecting seams in an appropriate way we can virtually manipulate the depths of objects in the scene.